The Summer of Sonic Team

[WarTraveller]

As a celebration of 27 years of nostalgia and gaming, SonicGuru has decided to run a sort of contest to see what the community thinks is the best Sonic the Hedgehog character! And everyone is invited to take part! The rules are simple;

• Tell him your choices for the three best Sonic characters in the series. They can be from any part of the franchise; game, comic book, normal book, tv show, anime, film and so on.
• A little diatribe explaining why you think they're such good characters is not required, but it IS appreciated - and it may help make your case.
• NO FAN CHARACTERS - which makes sense, I suppose.
• Deadline is May 1st, 2018.

If you're wondering, here are my picks for Three Best Characters in Sonic (in no specific order);

1. Rouge the Bat: In a franchise known for badly-written female characters, from the stalker Amy Rose, to...well, Princess Elise, Rouge kind of stands out as a character that SEGA haven't actually botched (or at least she's not AS botched as the rest of them). She's still a fairly independant, powerful, assertive and effective character who mixes her roles of Agent, Spy and Thief without one aspect overtaking the other and allowing herself to be Flanderised for it. Except whenever the fanbase tries to write her. Or in Treasure Team Tango. But those don't count.
2. Shade the Echidna: Yes, really. Shade was a character that took a few risks in a game that took a few risks; she was an Echidna, she was competant, she had a good character to her and she was badass. Plus her design is cool and her personality is cool and her weaponry and background is cool and - frankly - she is better than her supposed inspiration (Julie Su) in every way. And then...Penders happened, and the games haven't taken a single risk since. Well, except for...
3. The Avatar: Yes, it's glorified fanfiction. Yes, it's pandering to the highest degree. Yes, the actual character creator isn't as deep as it could have been. And yes, the game he hails from is utter pigswill. But The Avatar from Forces was such a bold move, very clearly done in the face of all the mockery and DeviantART references it was bound to recieve. It would have been so easy to botch it and make the Avatar too powerful and competant (on par with resident Mascot Sue Sonic, of course), making the whole thing feel like self-insert fanfiction at its grossest...and they did. But it's still damn fun to mess around with both the character and the creator, and even with his hyper-competancy it's still a lot better than what the rest of the game was like...at least he actually got to do something outside of stand around and smile. COUGHCLASSICCOUGH